Cammie McGovern - Neighborhood Watch
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Neighborhood Watch: summary, description and annotation
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A riveting and frightening tale of false accusation from the author of Eye Contact Twelve years ago librarian Betsy Treading was convicted of murdering her neighbor, the bohemian loner Linda Sue. After DNA testing finally exonerates Betsy, she returns to her suburban community determined to salvage her life and find the true killer. As she begins to pick apart the web of secrets, lies, and love affairs uncovered in the wake of her trial, Betsy suspects that her tight-lipped neighbors may know something that she has denied even to herself. In Neighborhood Watch, Cammie McGovern captures the nail-biting electricity of the best literary thrillers and zeros in on the subterranean tension abuzz in a town whose dark secrets threaten to obliterate the glossy fa?ade of a perfect life. It is also the story of a woman coming into her own, finding her strength, and taking control of her life. It asks readers, what sort of price would you pay for the sake of your reputation? Intricately woven, psychologically astute, and filled with complex and surprising characters, Neighborhood Watch marks a significant step in the career of this talented author.
Cammie McGovern: author's other books
Who wrote Neighborhood Watch? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Cammie McGovern
Cammie McGovern
Cammie McGovern
Cammie McGovern
MaryJane Davidson
Cammie Ho
Marla R. Miller
Cammie McGovern
Cammie McGovern
Betsy Thompson
Ferris
Betsy La Honta
Cammie McGovern
Eliza Fowler Haywood
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Table of Contents
Also by Cammie McGovern
The Art of Seeing
Eye Contact
For Mikiewhom I love more with every year
Violence in the suburbs is not accompanied by the sounds we associate it within cities. No screams or gunfire or sirens. In our case, one ambulance, one fire truck, and five police cars moved onto our street and did their work without a sound. We had only a blanket of silence and the frozen images we gathered, standing at our picture windows watching uniformed men, too many to count, go inside and emerge an hour later with a body, tagged and covered. Though the lips of the ambulance drivers moved as they bore their grim weight into the car, we heard none of the words they spoke. Cocooned in our living rooms, we armed ourselves with telephones and called one another with nothing to say except that we couldnt believe what we were all seeing.
Its been twelve years since I lived on Juniper Lane and we watched one anothers lives through windows that opened up like TV screens onto the street. I suspect the houses are no longer identical. Additions have been built. Exteriors painted alternate earth tones. I expect its no longer possible to park in the driveway of the wrong house and believe you are home.
When we first moved onto the block, we stood taller than the trees planted on our front lawns. From the highway, our street looked like an oval of Monopoly houses dropped down in a cornfield. We moved here imagining strollers and childrens toys littering the driveway. We pictured sprinklers going, muddy footprints and messes we would one day yell about. We bought these houses assuming the unsettling newness would give way to something else, something more. That was the point, we thought. What we would bring to the identical beige our houses were painted. Life. Mess. Children. But then nothing transpired as anyone planned. For a while it was better than we imagined. And then it was worse.
I was the one whod insisted on this house. From the first time we saw it, I wanted it more than I could even explain. Please, I told Paul, who looked a little pale at the prospect of a mortgage a thousand dollars a month more than we could afford. We wont spend money for ten years after this, I promised, imagining this community would feel like a safety net, a family of some kind, assurance that we wouldnt be alone.
Then we moved in. The first neighbor I met was Kim, a Korean mother of three. She came over, dictionary in hand, to apologize for what shed done to our toilet. Its a terrible tragedy, she said, flipping through the pages of her Korean/English dictionary.
A tragedy? I said.
I flush diapers and everything gets backed up. I didnt know.
We learned soon enough, when we found a strangers tampon floating in our toilet bowl, that the problemclogged pipeswas endemic and not easy to resolve.
Isnt it awful? asked Barbara, the second neighbor I met. She told me she used a strainer to fish the stuff out before anyone else saw it. Im a little tired of hearing my husband point out all our problems.
It was unsettling, to say the least.
Yours might be better! she said, walking away. Dont listen to me!
I try to remember things as clearly as I can, living as I do now in close quarters with women who know nothing of suburbia beyond what theyve seen on TV. I tell them it wasnt all perfect. Some days it felt as if we hovered expectantly, our collective breath held for some new piece of bad news. I tell them nothing was exactly how it looked. Some days it seemed as if the drama wed moved there hoping to avoid was, in some way we couldnt explain, what we were all waiting for.
One thing thats easier about living in prison: The worst has already happened.
CHAPTER 1
In the twelve years Ive lived in the Connecticut Correctional Institute for Women, Ive tried in vain to forget about the past and focus instead on the here and now, on contributions I can make to improve the quality of life for everyone in here. I am different than most of the other inmates, whove grown up in either juvenile detention centers or trailer parks they shared with rats that were, for some, more pleasant than their stepfathers. Scratch a female inmate, Ive discovered, and youll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men. Ive also learned this much: Im not better than any of these women, norfor all my education and degreesam I smarter. Weve made the same mistakes, misjudged other people and ourselves.
Officially I am the prison librarian, a job for which I get paid thirty-five cents an hour. I solicit donations from publishers and local libraries, and in twelve years have transformed a bookshelf of thirty tattered paperbacks into a library of more than six hundred titles, some delivered straight from the publisher. Books with pages so sharp and clean the girls have gotten paper cuts turning them.
For the last six years Ive also served as an inmate representative on the prison welfare committee. There I won Wanda her right to keep more than one nail polish in her cell so she could re-create her old days as New Havens most popular manicurist, the life she had before she shot and killed the husband whod been beating her for fourteen years. Wanda is my best friend here, and I believe her when she says she felt like she had no other choice. Whats done is done, she says, and Id like to get back to work.
To a certain extent, she can. Not for money, of course, but she can ply her trade, as can I. Once upon a time I was at the top of my class in the UConn Library Science Program. I was the first hired and the fastest-rising assistant to the head librarian the Milford Town Library had ever seen. Readership, circulation, and interlibrary loans all increased under my stewardship right up until the day I was arrested, after which, of course, I have no more figures. We were on the cusp of numbers that would win us more state funding. I wouldnt mind knowing what became of that, but I dont.
The media dubbed me the Librarian Murderess. One newspaper described me as a Victorian Volcano, as if being a librarian might still be a reflection of ones sexual mores, which of course is ridiculous and archaic thinking. We librarians like books. We also enjoy research. Above all, we like serving people, which is what defines librarians, not our myopia or our sexless hair buns. We believe that when books are present and learning is possible, all people benefit. In my time here Ive watched a twenty-three-year-old woman learn to read to keep up with her daughter in the first grade on the outside. Ive watched another go from reading only the worst of our most popular titlesthe blood-soaked crime novels the women here have a bottomless appetite forto other genres: a collection of short stories, a biography of a tennis pro. Small satisfactions, but real ones nevertheless. Sometimes I believe Ive made a larger difference here than I could have at my old job, wherelets be honestthe illiterate didnt often walk through the door.
But a recent flurry of attention surrounding my life here has been a little unnerving. Some years ago, following a Phil Donohue Show featuring inmates freed after new DNA testing proved them innocent, I had twenty women stop by my library looking for stationery and ballpoint pens. Ill admit that I got caught up by the episode, too. The shaggy-haired blond man looked in the camera, one prominent front tooth missing, and said, Freedom is the sweetest drink Ive ever tasted. Hed served twenty-six years in prison for a rape he didnt commit against a woman hed never met. For the women who came in, I started an impromptu seminar on formal letter writing: Dont end every sentence with an exclamation point! I told them. Dont dot your
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